Reporting from an enterprise data warehouse has become the lifeblood of today's dynamic enterprises. For years now enterprises have been accumulating huge amounts of information that is now being mined from the data warehouse via reports for purposes of many enterprise functions, such as: controlling, managing, forecasting, planning, budgeting, purchasing, inventorying, marking, etc.
The Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW) via browsers have now made interfaces to reporting tools omnipresent, such that employees, customers, managers, analysts, and the like can access the data warehouse information via WWW-enabled reporting tools from virtually any computer located anywhere around the globe.
When a user accesses a reporting tool, via a WWW browser or otherwise, that user eventually exits the reporting tool either normally or abnormally (crash of some sort) at some point in time. The user may have navigated to a beneficial spot or state within the reporting tool, which may have taken the user server minutes or more to get to.
Yet, when the user returns back to the reporting tool the previous state or location within the reporting tool is not the initial screen the user sees; rather the user must manually recreate the previous state within that reporting tool. This is time consuming and cumbersome.
Therefore, there is a need for improved techniques for managing a user's session with reporting tools accessed by that user.